Friend of My Youth

to give her mother an injection, she had thought about men, putting names one upon another as if to pass the time, just as you’d name great rivers of the world, or capital cities, or the children of Queen Victoria. She felt regret about some of them but no repentance. Warmth, in fact, spread from the tidy buildup. An accumulating satisfaction.
    “Well, that’s one way,” said Margot staunchly. “But it seems weird to me. It does. I mean—I can’t see the use of it, if you don’t marry them.” She paused. “Do you know what I do, sometimes?” She got up quickly and went to the sliding doors. She listened, then opened the door and stuck her head inside. She came back and sat down.
    “Just checking to see Debbie’s not getting an earful,” she said. “Boys, you can tell any horrific personal stuff in front of them and you might as well be speaking Hindu, for all they ever listen. But girls listen. Debbie listens.…
    “I’ll tell you what I do,” she said. “I go out and see Teresa.”
    “Is she still there?” said Anita with great surprise. “Is Teresa still out at the store?”
    “What store?” said Margot. “Oh, no! No, no. The store’s gone. The gas station’s gone. Torn down years ago. Teresa’s in the County Home. They have this what they call the Psychiatric Wing out there now. The weird thing is, she worked out there for years and years, just handing round trays and tidying up and doing this and that for them. Then she started having funnyspells herself. So now she’s sometimes sort of working there and she’s sometimes just
there
, if you see what I mean. When she goes off, she’s never any trouble. She’s just pretty mixed up. Talk-talk-talk-talk-talk. The way she always did, only more so. All she has any idea of doing is talk-talk-talk, and fix herself up. If you come and see her, she always wants you to bring her some bath oil or perfume or makeup. Last time I went out, I took her some of that highlight stuff for her hair. I thought that was taking a chance, it was kind of complicated for her to use. But she read the directions, she made out fine. She didn’t make a mess. What I mean by mixed up is, she figures she’s on the boat. The boat with the war brides. Bringing them all out to Canada.”
    “War brides,” Anita said. She saw them crowned with white feathers, fierce and unsullied. She was thinking of war bonnets.
    She didn’t need to see him, for years she hadn’t the least wish to see him. A man undermines your life for an uncontrollable time, and then one day there’s nothing, just a hollow where he was, it’s unaccountable.
    “You know what just flashed through my mind this minute?” Margot said. “Just the way the store used to look in the mornings. And us coming in half froze. We had a hard life but we didn’t know it.”
    We had power, Anita thought. It’s a power of transformation you have, when you’re stuffed full of fear and eagerness—not a thing in your life can escape being momentous. A power you never think of losing because you never know you have it.
    “She used to come and beat on the door,” said Margot, in a flattened, disbelieving voice. “Out there. Out there, when Reuel was with me in the room. It was awful. I don’t know. I don’t know—do you think it was love?”
    From up here the two long arms of the breakwater look like floating matchsticks. The towers and pyramids and conveyor belt of the salt mine look like large floating toys. The lake is glintinglike foil. Everything seems bright and distinct and harmless. Spellbound.
    “We’re all on the boat,” says Margot. “She thinks we’re all on the boat. But she’s the one Reuel’s going to meet in Halifax, lucky her.”
    Margot and Anita have got this far. They are not ready yet to stop talking. They are fairly happy.

Alice Munro
    Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published twelve collections of stories and two volumes of selected stories, as well as a novel. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, the United States’ National Book Critics Circle Award, the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have appeared in
The New